Monday, 8 July 2013

RoadsideAmerica.com has listed some terrific roadside attractions - many with reviews and comments by people who have enjoyed looking for their oddities. It is therefore probably not surprising that there are no reviews of the glowing tombstone in Sauk Centre Minnesota, (mentioned by Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk in their Haunted Locations Minnesota guide.) First, it is off in the middle of practically nowhere (compared to a lot of these attractions that are on the way to big cities - and no offense meant to the good people of Sauk Centre - it is a lovely town with a fabulous "Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center - so it is somewhere, but not very close to the big thoroughfares...). Second, the attraction has a disclaimer, "the tombstone glows at night -- although they concede it could be just light reflected from the nearby town." Ya think?

Well, my intrepid sister, nephew and mother spent the most mosquito-filled evening in our history scrabbling around the little Sauk Centre cemetery in the dark to try and find the tombstone that said only "Boss." That should have been a big hint about the truthfulness of the story - when you can't find a tombstone that glows in the dark and have to use your cellphone to try and read the inscribed names. It didn't help at all that the website "unexplainedresearch.com" has this picture on the page where they describe the glowing tombstone. Note the vivid detail! Shouldn't that be easy to find?

The jpeg is even labeled "Boss headstone", so when we we looked, we concentrated on white "kind of chalky" rectangular things. There was no information about where it was in the cemetery, so we fumbled around in the dark and got eaten alive by mosquitoes all to little avail.

This seemed like a likely one,

but it only looks like it glows, because I shook the camera taking the picture.

These old white ones also looked like they glowed a little bit,

...but you can see (better than I could at the time) that there is more on this stone than just the name "Boss".

Of course it turned out to be straight back on the road about 2/3 of the way into the cemetery and the biggest stone in the place - NOW HONESTLY, does THIS->

look like the real tombstone below? Really?! It's not even the right proportion!

What's that stone behind it? What happened to the double pedestal? Did they even bother to leave their desks to write about this thing?

Anyway - I took a picture in complete darkness and it was (as you would expect) completely black. When I photo-shop brightened it a whole bunch, I got this - which is a decent picture of a ghostly tombstone even though I can't say that it glows.